Master of Shapes brings Vive tracking to Daydream VR

The dev kit for HTC's Vive Tracker peripheral is already a hot commodity among virtual reality developers. The company says it's received 2300 requests for an allotment of 1000 dev kits. A team called Master of Shapes just might make the peripheral even more popular, this time for owners of Google's Daydream View VR headset. The team says it has used the Vive Tracker to create a room-scale VR experience for the affordable Daydream platform.

No, the Tracker does not make Daydream look any more natural

The company's blog explains some of the work behind this novel accomplishment. The team produced a 3D-printed mounting system for the front of the Daydream View headset and ported its Cover Me Vive Tracker demo to Daydream before gluing it all together in room-scale virtual space. The Vive Tracker requires the standard HTC Vive's sensor array, so some setup and extra hardware is still required for a room-scale experience.

The original purpose of the Vive Tracker was to bring position data from real-world objects into the VR space. The first demonstrations of the device focused on bringing baseball bats and weapons into VR experiences, but Master of Shapes' room-scale hack shows the open potential for the platform.

Master of Shapes had access to the kit in advance of January's Consumer Electronics Show, and it first demonstrated a multiplayer game called Cover Me that uses an HTC Vive in conjunction with a smartphone and a Vive Tracker to allow additional players to participate in the game without the need for multiple high-end PCs and Vive headsets. TR Editor-in-Chief Jeff Kampman and business guy Adam Eiberger had a chance to experience the Vive version of Cover Me at CES, and they were impressed by the multiplayer experience.